UN, second straw poll on succession to Guterres remains without minutes

On August 21, 2026 the United Nations Security Council held the second informal straw poll on candidates for the post of secretary general, the confidential procedure by which the fifteen members gauge support for the names in the running before arriving at a formal recommendation. This was confirmed by the Danish presidency-in-office: “The second round of informal straw polling has taken place” (transl. from English), said Ambassador Christina Markus Lassen, in a note relayed by Xinhua (Chinese state agency). The proceedings of the consultation are also reported independently by Security Council Report, by The National and by Euronews.

The mechanism deserves a description, because it explains just how little can be drawn from it. For each candidate, every member marks one of three options: encourage, discourage, no opinion expressed. The ballots of the five permanent members — those holding veto power — are indistinguishable from those of the ten elected members. No official record is kept and the ballots are destroyed once the exercise is complete. Results reach the candidates only through the permanent representatives who put forward their candidacy, that is, through diplomatic channels rather than publication.

Eight names are in the running: Rafael Grossi, Michelle Bachelet, Rebeca Grynspan, María Fernanda Espinosa, Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett, Olara Otunnu, Macky Sall and Ivonne A-Baki. In the first straw poll on July 30, Costa Rica’s Rebeca Grynspan emerged as the most supported, according to Security Council Report’s reconstruction. An advantage in an informal consultation is not, however, a settled outcome: in this format what matters is not how many preferences a candidate gathers, but whether any of the five permanent members has discouraged them, information the procedure is designed not to make public.

One quantitative element helps frame the state of the race. In the first round of 2026, about 34% of ballots read “no opinion expressed,” against about 21% in the first round of 2016, the year António Guterres was selected. This is a comparison between only two rounds, therefore not an established trend; it does, however, indicate that at this stage a larger share of Council members chose not to take a position compared with ten years ago, with a field of candidates that at the first pass appeared less defined.

The question of resources weighs on the backdrop of the succession. The United States Department of State has notified Congress of its intention to pay 850 million dollars to the United Nations: 725 million for the regular budget and 125 million for peace operations in Haiti and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This would be the largest payment by the Trump administration since it made its support as the principal contributor conditional on a path of reforms. US arrears remain around 5 billion dollars, of which more than 2 billion is on the regular budget and 3 billion on peace operations. It should be noted that, as things stand, this news comes from a single source — the notifications to Congress obtained by the Associated Press agency and reported by the Times of Israel; no independent confirmation is available.

The two dossiers intersect on one practical point: whoever leads the Glass Palace will inherit an organization whose liquidity depends to a significant extent on the decisions of a single contributor, and one that this contributor has tied to demands for reform. António Guterres’s mandate, his second five-year term, ends on December 31, 2026: little more than four months remain for the Council to arrive at a name.